Tomb Raiders

This month marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, when Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd that eventually gave rise to the Soviet Union. “Before 1991, whatever you thought about the Russian Revolution, it had to be accounted a sort of success, in that it had founded a nation. Now, by the same logic, it looks like a failure,” wrote Sheila Fitzpatrick in “Tomb Raiders,” her essay on the many interpretations of Lenin that have emerged since his death in 1924. Below is an excerpt of Fitzpatrick’s essay, which was published in the July 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Reviewed in the essay is Victor Sebestyen’s new biography, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, which he will be discussing with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn biographer Michael Scammell on November 14, at 7:00 p.m., at Book Culture on Columbus in New York City.

“Lenin lives!” That was the slogan in the Soviet Union for almost seventy years, even though Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet state, died only seven years into its existence. Uncharismatic and impatient with personal adulation in life, Lenin became, after his death in 1924, the object of a popular and official cult, which was used first to legitimize his successor, Joseph Stalin, and later to bolster the de-Stalinization campaign of Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. The iconic image shows Lenin on a podium, a small, balding man in a three-piece suit and worker’s cap, his arm outstretched to the future.

Now the future has arrived, in the form of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, in which Lenin’s Bolsheviks came to power. But the man lives no longer, not even as metaphor. The Lenin of the Soviet cult was blandly flawless. His body was preserved and displayed to the public in a dedicated Mausoleum in the Kremlin, and his reputation was supposed to be similarly unchanging and eternal. To be sure, there was a high degree of turnover, retrospectively speaking, among his political associates: Leon Trotsky and other comrades in arms disappeared early, thanks to the miracles of photo editing, while Stalin became a fixture at his side. Then, in the mid-1950s, Stalin vanished as well, leaving Lenin in solitary grandeur.

Under Khrushchev, reform-minded Soviet intellectuals such as Roy Medvedev held up Lenin and “Leninist legality”—the allegedly law-bound and nonarbitrary procedures of the 1920s—as the model to which the country should return. But already on the horizon were dissidents who were no more admirers of Lenin than they were of Stalin. Finding himself in Switzerland after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in the 1970s (like Lenin sixty years earlier), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote the entertaining novella Lenin in Zurich, a savage but oddly empathetic third-person monologue replete with Lenin’s beloved exclamation marks and underlinings. Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin, in his mid-forties, is tormented by the fear that the revolution to which he has dedicated his life will never come and that his own potential for leadership on the world stage will go unrealized. A central theme of the book is the temptation of “German gold,” which was on offer during the First World War to revolutionaries—Russian and Irish—who might have been able to destabilize their countries to Germany’s benefit. German gold was also a major preoccupation of Dmitri Vol­kogonov, one of the leader’s Russian biographers. Volkogonov was once a Soviet Leninist, but became convinced by the revelations of the early 1990s on post-Revolutionary repression that Lenin—not Stalin—was the real founder of Soviet totalitarianism.

The Soviet state died suddenly, in 1991, an unintended consequence of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. A Communist Party survives, the direct descendant of the Bolsheviks, but it is a minor player in contemporary Russian politics. The centenary posed a dilemma for Vladimir Putin’s regime, which has struggled with where to put Lenin and the Revolution in the new post-Soviet narrative of Russian history. After contemplating a “reconciliation” theme, Putin seems to have decided against public commemoration altogether.

Outside Russia, there have been scholarly conferences and books galore to mark the anniversary, but the prevailing atmosphere is more like a wake than a celebration. Before 1991, whatever you thought about the Russian Revolution, it had to be accounted a sort of success, in that it had founded a nation. Now, by the same logic, it looks like a failure. Socialism, despite a recent resurgence of interest among the young in the United States—witness Bernie Sanders—has lost many admirers. The days when such systems governed a third of the world and seemed to offer a serious challenge to Western democracy are only a memory—and perhaps not even that to the generations that came of age after the Cold War. Lenin, however, remains fascinating to many, both as a politician and as a personality. Indeed, there are so many Lenins in the literature that it can be quite bewildering.

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Afew months before the United States invaded Iraq, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, was asked on a radio show how long the war would take. “Five days or five weeks or five months,” he replied. “It certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” When George W. Bush departed the White House more than five years later, there were nearly 136,000 US soldiers stationed in the country.

The number of troops has fallen since then, but Bush’s successors have failed to withdraw the United States from the region. Barack Obama campaigned on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to send hundreds of troops into Syria. For years Donald Trump described America’s efforts in Afghanistan as “a waste” and said that soldiers were being led “to slaughter,” but in 2017 he announced that he would deploy as many as 4,000 more troops to the country. “Decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained. Every president, it seems, eventually learns to embrace our perpetual war.

With the Trump Administration’s attacks on affordable health care, immigration, environmental regulation, and civil rights now in full swing, criticism of America’s military engagements has all but disappeared from the national conversation. Why hasn’t the United States been able—or willing—to end these conflicts? Who has benefited from them? Is victory still possible—and, if so, is it anywhere in sight?

In March, Harper’s Magazine convened a panel of former soldiers at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. The participants, almost all of whom saw combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, were asked to reflect on the country’s involvement in the Middle East. This Forum is based on that panel, which was held before an audience of cadets and officers, and on a private discussion that followed.

Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four and he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a writer. Of course, what I meant by “writer” then was a writer of Superman comics. In part I was infatuated with the practically invulnerable Man of Steel, his blue eyes and his spit curl. I wanted both to be him and to marry him—to be his Robin, so to speak. But more importantly, I wanted to write his story, the adventures of the man who fought for truth, justice, and the American Way—if only I could figure out what the fuck the American Way was.

Sarah was four years old when her spirit guide first appeared. One day, she woke up from a nap and saw him there beside her bed. He was short, with longish curly hair, like a cherub made of light. She couldn’t see his feet. They played a board game—she remembers pushing the pieces around—and then he melted away.

After that, he came and went like any child’s imaginary friend. Sarah often sensed his presence when strange things happened—when forces of light and darkness took shape in the air around her or when photographs rippled as though shimmering in the heat. Sometimes Sarah had thoughts in her head that she knew were not her own. She would say things that upset her parents. “Cut it out,” her mother would warn. “This is what they put people in psychiatric hospitals for.”

In the fall of 1969, I was a freelance journalist working out of a small, cheap office I had rented on the eighth floor of the National Press Building in downtown Washington. A few doors down was a young Ralph Nader, also a loner, whose exposé of the safety failures in American automobiles had changed the industry. There was nothing in those days quite like a quick lunch at the downstairs coffee shop with Ralph. Once, he grabbed a spoonful of my tuna-fish salad, flattened it out on a plate, and pointed out small pieces of paper and even tinier pieces of mouse shit in it. He was marvelous, if a bit hard to digest.

The tip came on Wednesday, October 22. The caller was Geoffrey Cowan, a young lawyer new to town who had worked on the ­McCarthy campaign and had been writing critically about the Vietnam War for the Village Voice. There was a story he wanted me to know about. The Army, he told me, was in the process of court-martialing a GI at Fort Benning, in Georgia, for the killing of seventy-five civilians in South Vietnam. Cowan did not have to spell out why such a story, if true, was important, but he refused to discuss the source for his information.

The family was informed they would be moving to a place called Montana. Jaber Abdullah had never heard of it, but a Google search revealed that it was mountainous. Up to that point, he and his wife, Heba, had thought they’d be moving from Turkey to Newark, New Jersey. The prospect of crime there concerned Heba, as she and Jaber had two young sons: Jan, a petulant two-year-old, and Ivan, a newborn.

Montanasounded like the countryside. That, Heba thought, could be good. She’d grown up in Damascus, Syria, where jasmine hung from the walls and people sold dates in the great markets. These days, you checked the sky for mortar rounds like you checked for rain, but she still had little desire to move to the United States. Basel, Jaber’s brother, a twenty-two-year-old with a cool, quiet demeanor, merely shrugged.

Illustration (detail) by Danijel Žeželj

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"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."